Prevention Needs to Consist of More than Good Intentions

To continue a theme that crops up regularly in this blog, an article on AllAfrica.com argues that Kenya needs to invest more in prevention campaigns than curative ones. True enough, but this article is about non-communicable conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, mental illnesses, asthma and cancer. Health should start with prevention, whether that involves preventing communicable conditions, non-communicable conditions or even accidents such as road traffic accidents, industrial and agricultural accidents or injury and death from criminal acts.

However, realising that prevention is important is one thing, actually doing something about it is another. Take road traffic accidents (RTA), for example. All sorts of shenanigans have been put in place here recently, ostensibly to reduce RTAs. There are police checks and the rest, but what do the police do, exactly? Well, it's no mystery, they take a bribe and wave the driver on. There could be 22 people in a vehicle licensed for 14, bald tires, faulty brakes, out of date insurance or whatever, but as long as the police get their money, no further questions are asked.

In a country where health spending and health infrastructure has been reduced and continues to be reduced since the early 1980s, what exactly are health professionals supposed to do about all these conditions, communicable and non-communicable? The fact that prevention is better and cheaper than cure is irrelevant when there is bugger all money, anyway. But, even where prevention is even felt to be worth the effort, such as with HIV/Aids, are the figures for HIV transmission falling? Certainly not.

There is plenty of talk about preventing HIV but only 30% of HIV funding is allocated to HIV prevention. Most of that (which is probably nowhere near 30% of funding in reality) goes into a lot of mindless bullshit cobbled together by bigoted donors who don't give a damn about whether HIV transmission is really reduced as long as no one offends against their high minded but ultimately self serving interpretations of Christian morality. And it usually is Christian morality.

A report by a Nairobi based institution has come up with some alarming but unsurprising figures on teenagers knowledge of sex and their sexual behaviour. A large percentage of teenagers are having sex but they know little or nothing about safe sex. Unsurprising because they have been taught little or nothing about safe sex. Where has all the tens of millions of dollars intended for HIV prevention gone? It is has gone into not teaching teenagers about safe sex. I don't know how much money can be spent on the non achievement of something; that is in serious need of investigation. But the money is gone and the knowledge is nowhere to be found.

The report goes on to say that 40% of girls and 50% of boys have sex before the are 19, they believe all sorts of rubbish about sex, they fear pregnancy more than HIV, sex education is not taught in most schools, contraception is usually not mentioned (for fear of horrifying donors, politicians and church leaders, who are very sensitive people), half of the girls in a survey had exchanged sex for money, gifts or cash and 47% of the teenagers surveyed either had a child, were pregnant or had undergone an abortion. A separate study finds that 5.5 million girls between 15 and 19 give birth annually in Kenya, that's one eighth of the entire population!

If the calls for investment in preventing disease were to lead to improvements in very basic goods, such as water, sanitation and infrastructure, basic living conditions, primary health, education, gender equality, legal reform and things like that, Kenya would eventually be a lot better off. But it seems more likely that if any money is provided to prevent diseases and improve health, it will be spent on following purely political, commercial and religious agenda. Once those have been attended to, there's rarely any money left for anything else.